The scorpion is an insect that differs little from its ancestral species, which were among the first animals to walk on land hundreds of millions of years ago. It has been observed that individuals of this species, when trapped among the flames with no visible escape route, do a remarkable thing: they turn their sting on themselves and commit suicide! A behavior that offers no evolutionary advantage, as on the slim chance that the fire would go out, the surviving animals could continue to reproduce. A behavior that contradicts the theory that insects are biological robots because they exhibit standardized behaviors.
The simplest way I can explain this behaviour is that the evolution of life does not build robots, but instead creates neural systems for information processing and decision making. Recurring patterns of behaviour emerge from the complex operation of self-organised neural circuits, which in most cases do indeed favour maximum reproductive potential. So then, these tiny nervous systems with several orders of magnitude fewer neural synapses than our brains produce a behaviour that betrays evidence of their internal functioning:
- These animals experience pain, meaning pain as a stimulus that the animal tries to eliminate.
- These animals experience fear, meaning fear as an internal mental projection of a future situation.
- They have knowledge that they possess a murderous tool with which they kill their prey and defend themselves from their predators: the stinger.
- They associate the feeling of pain with their body as they point the stinger at themselves.
- The association of pain with self-consciousness, since pain is an elementary form of mental state, and consciousness is thought upon thought, constitutes a primitive form of consciousness. So pain is in a sense conscious.
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